ADA TV puts control of waiting room content in dentists' hands

ADA TV: From left, Drs. Jacob C. Duke, Kirby Bunel and Zachary T. Began of Oral & Facial Surgery of Northeast Texas pose for photo. Dr. Bunel transforms the waiting areas in his 12,500-square-foot oral surgery facility into his own variety show thanks to ADA TV.

Editor's note: This is the ninth in a series of articles about Internet marketing that feature interviews with ADA members to describe how PBHS, the website and marketing services provider endorsed by ADA Business Resources, is helping dentists address today's marketing challenges.

Dr. Kirby Bunel knows better than to waste a captive audience. Thankfully for the patients at his Texarkana, Texas-based oral surgery practice, he also knows better than to bore them.

Every day, he transforms the waiting areas in his 12,500-square-foot oral surgery facility into his own variety show, so to speak, thanks to a plug-and-play system that PBHS, an ADA Member Advantage-endorsed provider of dental marketing services, created and launched in partnership with the ADA Catalog.

This new content platform, named ADA TV, enables Dr. Bunel to easily present his patients and others in his waiting areas with a variety of content that he has carefully curated. It streams over his practice's wireless Internet by way of a Chromebit computer stick plugged into the TV's HDMI ports.

"It's cool," Dr. Bunel said. "It's a good product. It's good looking. It just automatically loads and runs. Virtually, all the assistants have to do is just go out and turn on the television and let it play. We live in a corner of the state where the Internet service isn't nearly as good as it is in the city, and it runs fine where we are. It's very esthetically pleasing, too. It looks nice out there. It's clean."

By putting control of their waiting room TV content literally in the palms of the hands of dentists and specialists like Dr. Bunel, the ADA and PBHS have provided a tool capable of entertaining, informing and marketing — a powerful combination that flows gracefully, suggested Dr. Bunel.

"It's not constant dental stuff bombarding the patients in the waiting room," he said. "They'll run clips of current events and news of the day or severe weather expected or that the World Series was won by the Houston Astros. They have that kind of stuff interspersed through there. You don't feel like you're being brainwashed in the waiting room by Dr. Bunel."

The service piques patients interest, leading inquiries about services that Dr. Bunel's practice, Oral and Facial Surgery of Northeast Texas, offers. "It certainly enhances the patient experience and reinforces our image as experts," Dr. Bunel said. "It does so better than any other information-sharing medium that I have ever used before."

An early subscriber, Dr. Bunel, as is typical for enrollment, completed a questionnaire before launching the new waiting room service in his three-dentist, 13-treatment-room surgical practice. That helped to streamline the considerable content options to his particular practice's needs.

"They have a catalog of things that they can run that they already have in their library, according to certain subjects," he said. "So if you want to talk about dental implant treatment, wisdom teeth, anesthesia — things that are important to me — then it'll kind of be like that. We don't talk about making dentures or doing veneers or tooth whitening, or any of those services. They're not on my feed because we don't offer those services, but they do (offer) general information about what those services might be."

ADA TV allows plenty of wiggle room to adjust content as needed. The ADA's popular Toothflix 2.0 patient education video series are already pre-loaded on the platform. Dentists can promote their practices and inform patients about the services they offer with clinical videos, specialty practice content, social media page activity and original video content. Because the platform can access and play videos from YouTube, practices have access to entertainment clips and additional ADA Mouth Healthy content.

Dr. Bunel is planning to further customize his content adding original video content, an add-on option for subscribers to the service. PBHS is sending a video team to the practice to record the custom content, including patients' and referring dentists' testimonials. Dr. Bunel regards the service as very cost-effective.

"It's kind of a big deal to have a video crew come to my location," he said. I am way up in Northeast Texas. If you live in Dallas or Houston or Austin, you probably have a little easier access to that. So, the cost, what we are paying for that, I think seems reasonable. To have someone show up to do the videography, not to mention the intellectual efforts to be made to produce something that's high-quality, that people will watch. There's an art to that — editing video — so you can have a nice cohesive 30- to 90-second video clip that's engaging.

"We'll own all of that video, so if I ever want to do cable advertising or a commercial or establish a YouTube page, which they'll do for me, then we'll have video content for it."

Broadcast packages for ADA members start at $75 per month ($125 per month for nonmembers), plus a one-time activation fee.

For more information on ADA TV system, visit ADA.org/tv or call 1-888-993-5664.